Traditionally, local pharmacists have supplied their patients with prescription mediations in round containers with child-resistant closures. In recent years, pressure to lower medical costs has made it increasingly more common for prescriptions to be dispensed from centralized locations and delivered by mail.
Some centralized prescription facilities have automated the filling process, causing them to abandon the traditional round pill container because of handling problems including capping difficulties and a closure that overhangs the container's body. Today, the package of choice for automated filling locations is a round bottle that accepts a threaded, two-piece child-resistant closure.
One problem with such containers is that the child-resistant closure needs to be fully removed from the container in order to dispense product. This can encourage a patient to leave the cap off, thus making the package non child-resistant. Also, the patient needs to deal with the loose cap while the medication is being dispensed from the container.
There are other improvements that can be made in the automated filling and delivery process. For example, a filled prescription package is typically mailed in a reinforced envelope that must be addressed separately from the medication container; this creates a potential for misdirecting an order. Also, round containers are not “mail-friendly”, are cumbersome for a patient to transport in a pocket or purse, and do not store well in medicine cabinets. Required “compliance” labels contain increasingly greater amounts of information, that is difficult to fit onto some round containers. Reading this information is complicated by the fact that a round container needs to be rotated as the information is read.